Part 33 (1/2)
”I don't think it likely,” said Raed. ”We may all venture to go to sleep, I guess, and trust to Guard to keep watch for us.”
”I don't know about that,” Kit remarked, patting the old fellow's head. ”He's eaten so much of our woodpile, that he will be but a drowsy sentinel, I'm afraid.”
The fire was replenished with blubber; and we all lay down on our mossy beds inside our fresh-smelling tent.
The sun must have been still high in the north-west; but so wild and dark were the clouds, that it had grown quite dark by nine o'clock.
The damp wind-gusts sighed; the surf swashed drearily on the rocks.
Despite all our efforts to bear up and seem gay, a weight of doubt and danger rested heavily on our spirits. ”Where is 'The Curlew' _now_?”
was the question that would keep constantly recurring, followed by a still more ominous query, ”What would become of us if she should not return?”
”Isn't there a town out on the Atlantic coast of Labrador, a town or a village, settled by the Moravian missionaries?” Raed asked suddenly, after we had been lying there quietly for some minutes.
”Seems to me there is,” Kit replied after a moment of reflection.
”There's one indicated on our geography-maps, I'm pretty sure, called _Nain_, or some such scriptural name. Don't you remember it, Wash?”
I did distinctly; and also another, either above or below it on the coast, called Hopedale, colonized by missionaries from South Greenland.
”Those Moravians are very good folks, I've heard,” Wade said. ”They're a very pious, Christian people. I have read, too, that they have succeeded in Christianizing many of the coast Esquimaux.”
”Those Huskies must make queer Christians!” exclaimed Donovan.
”How far do you suppose it is out to those towns, Nain, say, from here, for a guess?” Raed asked a few minutes after.
”I was just thinking of that,” said Kit. ”Well, I should say four hundred miles.”
”Not less than six hundred,” said Wade.
I thought it as likely to be seven or eight hundred.
”That would be a good way to travel on foot,” muttered Raed reflectively.
”Yes, it would,” said Kit. ”Still I shouldn't quite despair of doing it if there was no other way out of this.”
”How long would it take us, do you suppose?” Raed asked after another pause. ”How many miles a day could we make, besides hunting and getting our food?”
”Not more than twelve on an average,” Kit thought.
”Suppose it to be seven hundred miles, that would take us near sixty days,” Raed remarked; ”seventy, counting out Sundays.”
”We never could do that in the world!” Wade exclaimed. ”It would take us till midwinter, in this country! We should starve! We should freeze to death!”
”Couldn't very well do both,” Kit observed rather dryly.
”The journey would be well-nigh impossible, I expect,” Raed remarked.
”On getting in from the coast, we should probably meet with no sea-fowl, no seals: in fact, I hardly know what we should be able to get for game. I have heard that caribou-deer are common in Labrador; but they are, as we know from experience in the wilderness about Mount Katahdin, very difficult to kill. And then our cartridges!”
”We might possibly attach ourselves to some party of Esquimaux going southward,” Kit suggested.